Surge not tracking Active Minutes

[Dmthomas36]

Has anyone ese in the last 24 hours exerienced with the original Surge the active minutes are not tracking. I have done training today which has tracked and are showing in my exercise but both are showing as no active minutes gained and the active minute icon is showing as 0 also. i thought it may just be an issue with my IOS app but I have logged onto the main website and it is also the same on that. I have deleted the app and reistalled, I have signed out of my account and then signed back in. I have turned my surge off from the settings on the watch and back on again and non of this has made a difference my minutes is still 0.

Any suggesttions? :

Moderator edit: Clarified subject.

[YojanaFitbit · Accepted solution]

Thanks for popping by the forums @Dmthomas36! That's odd! If you're doing activities in the same way, basically same intensity and duration, your Active Minutes shoudn't vary a lot. Check this information in regards of Active Minutes are gain and restart your Fitbit Surge, just in case that it is a hardware issue.

Also I would recommend checking the information for previous activities during different days, to see exactly what are the activities that are giving you Active Minutes. You can go to the Fibit.com Dashboard on the computer or on the browser in your phone, click on Log > Activities > Choose the date and choose to see calories.

Your Active Minutes will be shown with the calories in high intensity level as green lines, as you can see in the picture. Moderate intensity level are shown in yellow lines.

 Hope this helps! 

[Dmthomas36]

Hi there, it seems to have resolved itself. since I switched my surge off. I have just done another 10 minutes on the elliptical (excactly the same as I did this morning) but it has now recorded it as active minutes. Hoepfully this is now solved. 🙂

[YojanaFitbit]

Hi @Dmthomas36! Thanks for posting back. I'm glad to see that the issue got resolved. I'm also wondering what could happen, maybe was just a bug in the system, but please keep me updated in case you notice anything odd again. 

If you have time, please check our Discussions board where you will find other members sharing their experiences and tips for an active lifestyle, you might be interested in this topics: Marathon Training or How do you break out of your sedentary lifestyle?

Catch you later.

[Dunno071]

Hi I seem to be having the same problem! Every other measure is running as normal but this is the second day that "active minutes" is just showing zero despite plenty of activities that normally register. I've done all the restarts etc...

[Dunno071]

Ok now I've realised that its not recorded my sleep for the last two nights either! What function is failing here??

[YojanaFitbit]

Hi, @Dunno071. Thanks for joining the Forums! Wow! that doesn't sound good! Which activities are you doing? Did you read this post? Your active minutes are earned taking in count the intensity of your workouts and they will be only awarded after 10 minutes of continuous moderate-to-intense activity. 

You can check your Active Minutes information using the steps in the post above! Your Activity History will tell us more information. If you can post that screenshot, it would be great! 

About your sleep logs, if you already synced your tracker, restart your Surge a couple of times and you can manually log your sleep information. Open your Fitbit App, Tap on the Sleep tile and tap on the (+) sign to ad a new sleep log. Remember to use the correct date and time!

Hope this helps! 

[Sparky617]

Mine is failing to count my morning walk the past couple of days as well.  I just restarted it.  I'll see if that helps.   I take the dog for a walk for about 40 - 60 minutes, with GPS tracking on.  Up until the past couple of days, it would always log as active minutes (3 mph pace, 5000+ steps in 45 minutes).  It hasn't logged the past couple of days, but it does count my active minutes on the treadmill throughout the day as long as I go over 10 minutes.   My treadmill pace is typically 3 mph, a pace I can walk forever without working up a sweat.  Handy for a quick break during the workday.

[Sparky617]

Update from yesterday.

I rebooted my Surge per the previous advice.  Today I went for a 3.3-mile walk with the tracker turned on to GPS track the walk.  This and the auto-sense activity walk show up on my dashboard under exercise. The 6000 plus steps are recorded.  While I was walking, once I went for more than 10 minutes the active minutes tracked upward, pretty much in line with the amount of time I was walking.   Once I finished my walk and the GPS track uploaded my 60 active minutes went to zero.  I'd say this is an app problem not a hardware problem with the watch.  I'm using an iPhone 6S running IOS version 10.3.2  Fitbit app version 2.45 (741), Surge version 34.6.1.   On Tuesday I did a walk in the morning that didn't register as active minutes despite registering the steps.  Also on Tuesday tracked a 45-minute bike ride (with the GPS feature) that did register.  The weirdness continues, yesterday I tracked a walk at 6 pm with the GPS feature and that time appears on my active minutes.  

[Sparky617]

Update from today.  I used the "hike" feature on my watch to track my walk this morning and so far it hasn't wiped out my active minutes from the walk.  The hike accounted for 3866 steps, average heart rate of 114 with 22 minutes in cardio and 13 minutes in fat burn.   Ordinarily, I would think that should register somewhere above the "light" category.  

The phone app showed the hike as active minutes for about an hour, even after syncing the GPS up to my phone.  I went back and looked a bit later and my active minutes dropped to 8, which is kind of interesting considering you're not supposed to count minutes as "active" until you hit 10 continuous minutes of activity.

I'm pretty much walking at the same pace I always have while taking the dog for a walk. Up until recently all of those walks counted as "active minutes"  I haven't changed any settings on my phone app or on the watch via the phone or desktop app.  I use my treadmill throughout the day to take a quick break from being a desk jockey.  When I use the treadmill I walk at a steady 3 mph with a 5% incline, pretty much the same or slightly slower pace than I do when walking the dog.  Those show up as active minutes if I go over 10 minutes.  Often, they'll show up as an auto-detect walk.  Since I'm not going anywhere I don't turn on the GPS.  Looking at one of the auto-detect walks from 20 minutes on the treadmill the heart rate was in the fat burn zone for almost the complete walk with an average of 105 bpm.

At some point, I will have to replace my Surge.  You're not giving me a lot of reasons to look at other Fitbit products when I do.  Between the non-Fitbit replaceable band and the non-replaceable battery, this product clearly wasn't ready for primetime when it was sold.

Edited to clarify.

[YojanaFitbit]

Hi @Sparky617, it's great to see you here! 

Sorry about the data that is missing in your Dashboard. Thanks a million for confirming all that information regarding the updates you've done to your devices. I don't think that the issues with your data is related to the GPS tracking specifically.

I'm very interested in helping you out with this, as you mentioned that your data has basically disappeared from your Dashboard. If this is not showing the correct amount of steps or active minutes just make sure that you don't have any manually log activity at that time.

Another reason that might causing this is if you have another tracker pair to your account, or if you're using MobileTrack in your phone. That might be causing this strange behavior in your Fitbit.

But if you're not using any of those options, please restart your tracker and give it a try today to see how it goes! In case that this doesn't help let me know so we can check the next step.

Thanks for your effort in solving this.

[Sparky617]

Yojana,

I rebooted the other day after reading this thread.  It didn't make any difference.   It always worked in the past.  I'd turn my GPS tracker on and take a walk, watching the phone while I'm walking the active minutes would increment up but once I finished the walk it would log the steps and the GPS track on my exercise dashboard but the active minutes will disappear.   If I don't track it with the GPS, walking at the same pace, the auto-track recognizes that I did a walk and logs it as active minutes.

Cycling doesn't seem to have the same problem.  I went for a ride today, GPS tracking with the Surge, and the time shows up as active minutes.

I have removed mobile track to see if that makes a difference.

[YojanaFitbit]

Hi @Sparky617, thanks for getting back to me! 

I appreciate the time you took in order to troubleshooting your Fitbit, It sounds strange, that it was working fine before and now the active minutes are disappearing. Are you doing anything different? Different routine or place, since it shouldn't be taking your data out once it is saved on your Dashboard.

Now, when you're using MobileTrack on your phone but you're also wearing your Fitbit, your Dashboard needs to choose which information will be showed permanently on your logs. Same thing if you're using your Fitbit but you manually entering information, our algorithms compare the overlapping data and decide that the activity that you log will take over. 

When you use GPS tracking the information will generate a map with its details so in this case this will be shown as predominant information. Good thing is that you're not using MobileTrack anymore, so let's give it a try for you next activities and hopefully you don't loose more data.

If you do, try to get screenshots of the issue in real time so we can further investigate this.

Thanks for your time! 

[Sparky617]

It registered OK on my walk this morning with the GPS tracking on.  Especially when biking, Mobile-Track would register more "steps" than the Surge and as soon as the Surge syncs up with my phone the dashboard would reflect what the Surge had for steps.

It would be nice if Fitbit had an algorithm to translate miles on a bike into steps.  It is kind of frustrating to spend 4 hours on a 60 mile bike ride and not hit 10,000 steps.  The Surge can auto-detect that I'm cycling so it shouldn't be hard to do that.  It doesn't need to track it rotation exactly to steps but though it does track the cycling as "active minutes."  I used to have a Zip until I lost it that I'd clip to my leg to get a better "step count" from cycling.  I'm not inclined to buy another zip to beat my Fitbit friends in the daily step battle.

[Sparky617]

Final thought on Mobile-Track, why even offer it as an option if it will mess up your dashboard?  Seems dumb.

[YojanaFitbit]

Thanks a million for your feedback @Sparky617! I appreciate the time you took in order to confirm the results of the troubleshooting steps you've tried. 

I understand your point about the way Fitbit tracks bike activities, there is a Feature Suggestion where you can place your vote and comment about it: Bike ride distance conversion to steps. It's being reviewed by our team. About comparing Fitbit trackers that are worn on the torso against the ones that are worn on the wristband, we advise to make sure Fitbit knows which wrist you wear the tracker on for better accuracy.

In regards to SmartTrack for outdoor biking, remember that by default SmartTrack recognizes an exercise that lasts at least 15 minutes. You can lower this setting to 10 minutes, or increase it as high as 90 minutes. For example, if you only want SmartTrack to detect your longer walks, you might change your duration settings to a 30-minute minimum. If it is not tracking correctly you can try to turn it off/on or restar it. 

For more details about MobileTrack usage you can go to our Fitbit article, it's really helpful.

I'll be around.

[ASquare]

Same problem 

no solution 

[YojanaFitbit]

Welcome to the thread @ASquare!

I'll be glad to help you out with the issues you're having. Are you getting steps and other information on your Dashboard? When did you start having this issues? Please add as many details as you can. I'll do my best to help you out with this.

I'll be around.

[annetteljones]

Same problem, no solution. My active minutes were over an hour of walking outdoors to 10 minutes. I charged my surge and the minutes reset to 10 minutes! At a time that I was in the car! No activity this morning when I walked the dogs over 3 miles!

[hendo7d]

Explain why I’m not logging anymore active minutes